From Bedlam to Brilliance – Bags of Bags

How Many of You have Bags of Bags?

Do you save bags? My guess is the majority of you do and that not only do you have bags of bags, but you also have bags just piled up somewhere. They could be plastic, paper, or a combination of both. What do you do with them? Is there a reason you are keeping so many?

I understand the need to keep some. I even have a bag of bags upstairs and another one downstairs. I keep them to line my smaller trash cans and for scooping out kitty litter. And, the reason I keep them in 2 different places is because I use them in rooms on both floors.

The picture above is just one example of what a client and I found when we started to organize her pantry closet. The interesting thing about this is as we were pulling out the bags, we found some stuffed inside of others and some that were loose. Once we saw how many she had, we just started to laugh. They were taking up an inordinate amount of room in this closet. There have been many times when I work with my clients that they, too, have tons of bags.

Even though this was a small project, we still followed my 4-step SPCA process:

Sort – Pulled all the bags out of the closet and put like with like.

Purge – Decided that all these bags were not needed, and recycled the rest. Because they were all crammed together in no particular order, it was hard to tell how many my client actually had.

Containerize – Took 2 of the larger bags and decided to only keep what could fit into them.

Assign a Home – Put the bags of bags back in the pantry closet.

The result of this is that space was made for storing additional kitchen items that before had no home anywhere.

Do you have lots of bags? How many do you have to keep? What are you going to do with them?